Emily St. John Mandel, 2022
Edition read: Picador, 2022, 255 pages
Fiction – (lo-fi) sci-fi
I enjoyed Mandel’s previous titles The Lola Quartet and Station Eleven and their themes of escape, isolation and reinvention, as well as the subtlety of her writing. What at first appears to be a series of vignettes develops into a single story. Initially, it is not apparent how – and why – these stories are connected, but the success of Sea of Tranquility, and what makes it stand out, lies in that it takes an element of sci-fi – a genre new to Mandel’s writing, albeit in lo-fi form here – and uses it to focus on the human desires and failings of her range of characters. Mandel’s characters routinely paint themselves into corners, and in Sea of Tranquility the sci-fi aspect brings a literal element to the past revisiting the present. These characters – who here, can travel through time and change planets – still yearn, are still uneasy, live normal lives, oft to the point of numbness, all stressed by Mandel’s understated writing style.
Worth reading? Yes.
Worth re-reading? Yes.
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